Heretics Quotes

“It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches — and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on.”
― Philip Pullman

“The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. (“Tomorrow”)”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin

“If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin

“All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.”
― Yip Harburg

“Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and a heretic”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

“Heretics are the only [bitter] remedy against the entropy of human thought.
("Literature, Revolution, and Entropy")”
― Yevgeny Zamyatin

“One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'—along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Without self-knowledge you have no root in yourselves personally; you may endure for a time, but under affliction or persecution your faith will not last. This is why many in this age (and in every age) become infidels, heretics, schismatics, disloyal despisers of the Church. They cast off the form of truth, because it never has been to them more than a form. They endure not, because they never have tasted that the Lord is gracious; and they never have had experience of His power and love, because they have never known their own weakness and need.”
― John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons

“If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

“It was not Christianity which freed the slave: Christianity accepted slavery; Christian ministers defended it; Christian merchants trafficked in human flesh and blood, and drew their profits from the unspeakable horrors of the middle passage. Christian slaveholders treated their slaves as they did the cattle in their fields: they worked them, scourged them, mated them , parted them, and sold them at will. Abolition came with the decline in religious belief, and largely through the efforts of those who were denounced as heretics.”
― Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner

“This authority stood steady as the cathedral itself. The building was raised once and for all, and for those who dare doubt it, something else was raised: The witch fires.”
― André Bjerke

“I have met with many souls who were afraid to speak their minds; from a vague anxiousness to a choking reaction. This restriction may come from a past life where this person was threatened, beaten, strangled, tortured or killed for expressing something unpopular or for declaring some truth. Heretics, those who took controversial positions, especially against the established Church, were the victims of terrible persecutions - and worse. Heretic ironically comes from the Greek hairetikos, meaning 'able to choose.' Thousands were condemned, then, for their ability to choose differently. And so, then and now, we all must choose standing safely with the system or defiantly and dangerously against the herd mentality/ machine/system – yes, perennial lessons of conformity or individuality. History can attest that Free Will and liberality are not always welcome in certain groups and societies. We must not be dissuaded, we can still shine our light.”
― Stephen Poplin, Inner Journeys, Cosmic Sojourns: Life transforming stories, adventures and messages from a spiritual hypnotherapist's casebook

“Isn't it strange how silence, in a way, has a sound of its own?”
― Greg Gifune

“Even a child could see the division between what the Galileans [i.e., Christians] say they believe and what, in fact, they do believe, as demonstrated by their actions. A religion of brotherhood and mildness which daily murders those who disagree with its doctrines can only be thought hypocrite, or worse.”
― Gore Vidal, Julian

“I think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of fortitude, or they would not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as they would give advantage to their many enemies; and they have not, like orthodox sinners, such a number of friends to excuse or justify them.”
― Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings

“Pastor Bates was a careful reader of theology, literature and history. He delighted especially in Gibbon's woeful treatment of Christians in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, perusing the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters routinely and with glee. He enjoyed brilliant heretics as only the confidently faithful can, seeing in Gibbon the inspired rantings of a cheerleader working himself into a frenzy for a losing team, getting especially rabid come the dreaded fourth quarter, when Jesus begins running up the score.”
― Scott M. Morris, The Total View of Taftly: A Novel

“The great march of metal destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is the reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“We are the outsiders, the heretics, the rebels, the revolutionaries, the blasphemers, the outcasts, the infidels. We are the Resistance. We are the Truth seekers. We are the Mathematikoi. We are the Hyperboreans. We are the Illuminati. We are contra mundum.”
― Adam Weishaupt, Contra Mundum

“Science itself is a quasi-religious faith, and is full of dogmas relating to its current paradigm, and any scientists who do not agree with the establishment are kicked out of science altogether – like heretics, freethinkers and blasphemers in religion.”
― Mike Hockney, The Sam Harris Delusion

“In a BBC broadcast in 1934, when he was a year away from finishing The General Theory, Keynes pinpointed the fundamental difference between an approach to the Depression based on frictions and imperfections and an approach based on more fundamental defects in the market system:
'On the one side were those who believe that the existing economics system is, in the long run, a self-adjusting system though with creaks and groans and jerks, and interrupted by time-lags, outside interference and mistakes ...
The strength of the self-adjusting school depends on its having behind it almost the whole body of organized thinking and doctrine of the last hundred years.
If the heretics on the other side of the gulf [among whom Keynes included himself] are to demolish the forces of nineteenth century orthodoxy ... they must attack them in their citadel.”
― Stephen A. Marglin, Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First-Century General Theory

“when they tell you god spoke the world into being
they mean Eve moaned from the earth
red clay under her fingernails
Lilith’s road wrapped all around her like smoke in the air and
bigfuckingbang
there it all was”
― Stephanie Greene

“The case of the general talk of "progress" is, indeed, an extreme one. As enunciated today, "progress" is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative. We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress—that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great deal more of nobody knows what.”
― G K Chesterton

“Brother Ramiro carried the carefully wrapped Compendium between his chest and his folded arms as they crossed the town square. Adelard glanced at the trio of scorched stakes where heretics were unburdened of their sins by the cleansing flame. He had witnessed many an auto da fé here since his arrival from France.

"Note how passersby avert their eyes and give us a wide berth," Ramiro said.

Adelard had indeed noticed that. "I don't know why. They can't know that I am a member of the tribunal."

"They don't. They see the black robes and know us as Dominicans, members of the order that runs the Inquisition, and that is enough. This saddens me."

"Why?"

"You are an inquisitor, I am a simple mendicant. You would not know."

"I was not always an inquisitor, Ramiro."

"But you did not know Ávila before the Inquisition arrived. We were greeted with smiles and welcomed everywhere. Now no one looks me in the eye. What do you think their averted gazes mean? That they have heresies to hide?"

"Perhaps."

"Then you are wrong. It means that the robes of our order have become associated with the public burnings of heretics to the exclusion of all else.”
― F. Paul Wilson, The Compendium of Srem

“it has always been remarked that those who wear the outward look of reprobation, like impious heretics and proud worldlings, hate or despise the Hail Mary or the Rosary. Heretics still learn and say the Our Father, but not the Hail Mary, nor the Rosary. That is their horror. They would rather wear a serpent than a rosary.”
― Louis de Montfort, True Devotion to Mary

“Will you tell me, William, you who know so much about heretics that you seem one of them, where the truth lies?
"Nowhere, at times," William said, sadly.
"You see? You yourself can no longer distinguish between one heretic and another. I at least have a rule. I know that heretics are those who endanger the order that sustains the people of God. And I defend the empire because it guarantees this order for me.”
― Umberto Eco

“The people that change the world are the world-historic figures that make the world believe what they believe about themselves. These people never believe the world. Like Dr. Stockmann, they stand proudly alone”
― Thomas Stark, Extra Scientiam Nulla Salus: How Science Undermines Reason

“It’s up to Illuminists alone. No one else is coming. We are against everyone. We are enormously outnumbered and surrounded, yet victory is certain to be ours ... because we are the Gnostic Legion of Reason and Knowledge, and we shall command the cosmic forces that can defeat any odds.”
― Adam Weishaupt, Contra Mundum

“It is always controversial when it comes to women with strong character at the workplace!”
― Sally El-Akkad

“I was always wild territory buried below manicured lawns
and once I had ripped pretty flowers from the careful parts of me
unearthed
keening
once I left the whole damn thing open to the sky
I touched a place in me too Wild to ever pull weeds again
or water plastic grass again
or prop the baby tree with sticks again
or call my soul cultivated again
I was never going down that way”
― Stephanie Greene

“I am distressed at the zeal of the heretics; and at the amnesia of the believers.”
― Leonard Ravenhill, Revival God's Way